HARDWARE(CELL PROCESSOR)
Sunday, February 14, 2010
, Posted by gurur@j at 2/14/2010 09:20:00 AM
HARDWARE
At the core of everything that the ps3 stands for is the awesome processor that was custom-built for it,dubbed the 'cell processor'
The story goes that after launching the ps2,sony executive wanted their next console to have the capability of outperforming the ever-increasing hardware of computers around it.The processor -the heart of any computing-was narrowed down as the one ascept to concentrate
on and make it unbeatable.
The ps3's heart can run eight processes in parallel,making it the fastest home-user processor ont he planet.And hey,it's being used by scientiest for super-computers tool.
The company then approached IBM,hte worlds leading makers and innovators of chips,to build a processor that would be two generations a head of the pc processor prevalent at the time.IBM was glad to oblige,but asked for a little help.in 2000,an alliance called STI was formed between IBM,sony computer entertainment and toshiba,who togeather worked on the design of the cell broadband engine architecture(CBEA), commonly known as the cell microprocessor.The first chip was tested in the SIT design cenetr at austin,texas.And the first real application, of course,was in the playstation 3.
Getting into the techenical ascepts of the cell processor would entail a lesson in microprocessor technology,with phrases like 'power processor element'and 'synergistic processing elements'being thrown about every couple of sentences.
In layman's terms,the cell processor is an eight-core processor,which means that it can compute eight different processor at the same time-a fantastic achivenment to improve the speed of computing.Each of these eight'cores' is also fitted with 256kb of memeory for local storage when processing an instruction.
The biggest problem for IBM with building such a chip was in figuring out how solved this problem by ensuring that the ps3 is smart enough to determine which cores are being used at a time and allot new
operations accordingly.
In the end,the 64-bit architecture,coupled with the 3.2 GHz core clock speed and the PS3 runs at 3.2GHz,that is the most commonly cited clock speed for it.
A worrying factor for such a high-powered processor is over-heating.In the PS3,sony managed to make room for a high-quality heat-sink that enables the cell processor to run smoothly at temputure as high as 85 degrees celsius.
Now,with these kinds of speeds,the amount of reliance on other factors of
computing,such as the RAM or the graphicscard, is substantilly reduced.Not that it stopped sony from coming out with a jaw-dropping graphics chipset............
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